Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

Reader links roundup

Another quick link roundup. What do you guys think of the really-short, nearly-content-free postings I’ve been doing over the past several days? They’re easier to slap together quickly, which is what I need given that my free time has been so tight. I promise I won’t abandon longer posts altogether, either way.

Courtesy of Jason Pickles: this video must have some provenance given the douchenozzle Rob’s reaction to having someone ask three questions — “are you a volunteer? are you paid? what do you do?” to the “paid walkers” of the Florida Republican GOTV effort.

From Bob: this might be a way to get off of oil dependency — or it might be snake oil, yet another bit of bad science. I don’t know enough about the technology behind this yet, but I’ll revisit it as soon as I do. I have a feeling it would take more energy to run the engine than the engine would generate. Also — how the hell are these “gold nanoparticles” attracted to cancer cells? This guy sounds like a quack through and through, frankly.

Also from Bob: what if the whole world could vote on the 2008 US election? So far the only country John McCain is carrying is Macedonia, but feel free to vote for whomever you’d like to see as the next “leader of the free world” (if you can call the president that any more). Hilariously enough, evidently this link has only gotten around to the Democrats in the States, because this poll has Obama winning there 80.8-19.2%.

From Groklaw‘s NewsPicks: why exactly is it that Microsoft is trying to muddy the “free software” waters lately? Why do they want us all confused? The obvious answer is that they can’t compete on merits, because an open source project will achieve a level of stability and features to rival their own products in extremely short order, due to the meritocratous nature of the open source programming model, and all without any monetary input. The long answer is in the article.

And finally, courtesy of Huffington Post: apparently Palin’s $150,000 shopping spree for designer clothes pales in comparison to the graft that Obama is guilty of, for having used a 767 to visit his grandmother on her deathbed. This asshat should be punched in the teeth.

Comments

The best part of this entire thing was the guy who said that the guy is a true american innovator because he wasn’t looking for someting, he just found it. So true American innovation is merely luck. Good to know.